But the Countess was, by no means, resigned to end her days in the odour of a tardy and insincere piety.  As soon as the sky had cleared a little across the Channel, she returned to England, and tried to repair her shattered fame by giving her hand to a son of Sir Thomas Bridges, of Keynsham, in Somerset, who was so enslaved by her charms that he was proud to lead the tarnished beauty to the altar.  And with this mockery of wedding bells “Messalina’s” history practically ended as far as the world, outside the Somersetshire village, where the remainder of her life was mostly spent, was concerned.  The fires of her passion had now died out, and the restless and still ambitious woman exchanged love for political intrigue.  She became the most ardent of Jacobites, and plotted as unscrupulously for the restoration of the Stuarts, as in earlier years she had planned the capture and ruin of her lovers.

Not content with treading the shady and dangerous path of intrigue herself, she set to work to undermine the loyalty of her only son, the young Earl of Shrewsbury, one of the most trusted ministers and friends of the Orange King; and such was her influence over the high-principled, if weak Earl that she infected him with her own treachery, until the man, whom William III. had called “the soul of honour,” stood branded to the world as a spy, leagued with the King’s enemies, and was compelled to leave England for ten years of exile and disgrace.

This corruption and ruin of her own son was the crowning infamy of one of the worst women who ever enlisted their beauty, of their own free will, in the service of the devil.

CHAPTER VII

A PROFLIGATE PRINCE

Of the sons of the profligate Frederick, Prince of Wales, Henry Frederick, Duke of Cumberland, was, by universal consent, the most abandoned, as his eldest brother, George III., of “revered memory,” in spite of his intrigue with the fair Quakeress, was the least vicious.  Each brother had his amours—­many of them highly discreditable; but for unrestrained and indiscriminate profligacy Henry Frederick took the unenviable palm.

Even the verdict of posterity is unable to credit this Princeling with a solitary virtue, unless a handsome face and a passion for music can be placed to his credit.  In his career of female conquest, which began as soon as he had emancipated himself from his mother’s apron strings, he left behind him a wake of ruined lives; not the least tragic of which was that of the lovely and foolish Henrietta Vernon, Countess Grosvenor, whom he dragged through the mire of the Divorce Court, only to fling her aside, a soiled and crushed flower of too pliant womanhood.

And yet, when his passion was in full flame, no woman was ever wooed with apparently more sincere ardour and devotion.